afongen

• Edweblogs.org: NECC 2003, a weblog set up for the National Education Computing Conference.
• OSCON wiki.
• Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. “Persistent patterns in long-lived online groups.”
• Scholars Who Blog.

Stanford University has released the code for its CourseWork course management system under an open source license.

I took some time off this week to spend with my sister and her son, who were in town for the holiday. We went to the Aboretum, the Children’s Museum, walked through some woods along the Mississippi River, hit a couple parks, went swimming… the usual. It was a lot of fun, and boy am I wiped out. Might take me a while to catch up with some things I want to write here.

The Nephew is an outgoing, energetic little boy. It’s really an effort keeping up with him; luckily the rest of us outnumber him and can take turns. What really amazed me is just how extroverted he is. Watching him engage people in conversation is draining. Yesterday at the lake, I found myself wanting to call him back from talking to someone or other (“stop bothering the nice man”) but realized that my sister — although watching carefully — seemed content to let him chat away. It struck me that my discomfort with his behavior was not caused by any concern that he was talking with strangers (he was, after all, closely observed by three responsible adult relatives) but rather the fact that I would never be that outgoing. Ever. And I have trouble imagining that anyone would be.

I asked my mother if I or any of my siblings had ever been that extroverted. Nope. Not all of us combined.

So I wonder: what if my son is an extrovert? I know that the difference between introversion and extroversion is rooted in chemistry, so it’s a distinct possibility. What would it take for me to deal with an extroverted kid? I’m exhausted after just a few days with The Nephew. And how well will I be able to judge what is genuinely inappropriate/impolite behavior as opposed to just something that makes me uncomfortable because I would never do it?

Punt, I suppose.

I just saw a television ad for PDF. Weird.

Just like the title says: Netscape 7.1 has been released, as has Mozilla 1.4. So far, using Netscape 7.1 on Windows doesn’t force me into all sorts of preference-resetting contortions when I quit and go back to Mozilla. Happy day.

No, I don’t use Firebird on Windows. I eventually will, I’m sure, but so far just don’t have a compelling need to do so. On OS X, on the other hand, I do prefer Firebird to the full-blown Mozilla package. At least for development, which is all that I use it for anymore on my Macs. Safari has become my default browser.

Imagine this job interview:

Interviewer: So tell me about what qualifications and skills you can bring to this job.
Applicant: None, really.
Interviewer: I see. Why should we hire you?
Applicant: I’ve been working a long time.
Interviewer: Sounds good to me, welcome aboard!

We’ve been going through some layoffs at work. Because all non-management jobs in Minnesota state government are union-represented, and because the unions respect seniority above all else — certainly above competence — this means that people with seniority get to “bump” people out of their jobs, regardless of whether the more senior employees are qualified. Pisses me off.

At long last, a final build of OpenOffice 1.0 is available for Mac OS X. This requires XWindows; Apple’s X11 works just great. I ran the installer with absolutely no problem and was up and running in a few minutes. Even the warnings that I might need to do some manual editing of a config file to get the Start OpenOffice script to work turned out to be unfounded: it asked me which X server I preferred to use and proceeded to just work.

I haven’t used it extensively, just played around a bit, but my impression so far is that it might be usable on my iBook. A bit sluggish to be sure, and I miss Jaguar’s font smoothing, but if I ever need an office suite, this will do nicely. No, it doesn’t feel like a Mac app, but that’s okay for now. At least I can use splat-S (or open-apple S if you prefer) to save instead of control-S.

I’m still keeping my eye on NeoOffice, which is working on an OS X-native version of OpenOffice. I just noticed NeoOffice/J, which is focusing on making OpenOffice work without X11. Using Java, it seems. Hm.

If you haven’t tried OpenOffice, give it a shot, especially if you’re on Windows and are used to Microsoft Office. OpenOffice 1.1 beta is very nice indeed. (Of course, I say this as someone who hardly even uses a word processor anymore, much less a spreadsheet or presentation software. And I have to say that MS Office 2003 looks spectacular.)

Just testing updates with Kung-Log.

Cool, A patch has been submitted for Apache to work around the broken Digest Authentication in Internet Explorer. Huzzah.

On PHP Complete: Windows Isn’t Ready for the Desktop. Tee hee.

I love that the first few comments are along the lines of “hmm, hasn’t happened to me,” and “here’s how you fix it.” Much as happens when someone complains that they can’t get something to “just work” in Linux. Which is of course his point: “just because someone has a problem with something doesn’t mean the OS is crap.”